Crystallizing DNA nanotechnology

DNA has garnered attention for its potential as a programmable material platform that could spawn entire new and revolutionary nanodevices in computer science, microscopy, biology, and more. Researchers have been working to master the ability to coax DNA molecules to self assemble into the precise shapes and sizes needed in order to fully realize these nanotechnology dreams.

For the last 20 years, scientists have tried to design large DNA crystals with precisely prescribed depth and complex features — a design quest just fulfilled by a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The team built 32 DNA crystals with precisely–defined depth and an assortment of sophisticated three–dimensional (3D) features, an advance reported in Nature Chemistry.

The team used their "DNA–brick self–assembly" method, which was first unveiled in a 2012 Science publication when they created more than 100 3D complex nanostructures about the size of viruses. The newly–achieved periodic crystal structures are more than 1000 times larger than those discrete DNA brick structures, sizing up closer to a speck of dust, which is actually quite large in the world of DNA nanotechnology.

"We are very pleased that our DNA brick approach has solved this challenge," said senior author and Wyss Institute Core Faculty member Peng Yin, Ph.D., who is also an Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, "and we were actually surprised by how well it works."

Scientists have struggled to crystallize complex 3D DNA nanostructures using more conventional self–assembly methods. The risk of error tends to increase with the complexity of the structural repeating units and the size of the DNA crystal to be assembled.